Okay. We’re back. I may have lost it a little talking about Unfair Flips earlier in the week, but now it’s time to talk about Q-Up, another game about flipping coins.
I really liked the Q-Up Demo. I actually played until I couldn’t anymore, because the demo stopped me. I thought it was great.
You may notice a slight tonal shift here between Unfair Flips and Q-Up, despite the fact that they’re both pseudo-incremental games about coin flips. This is because Q-Up is doing everything that Unfair Flips wasn’t.
I’ve mentioned before that I somewhat dislike idle/incremental games because if I’m not careful, they eat my time like a blackhole. I also don’t necessarily have any fun with them. To quote myself:
I resent idle games because for whatever reason, they work on me. I am entirely capable of looking at them, understanding how the mechanics work, and what they are going to make me do, why they are exploitive, and then I play them anyway.
Unfortunately for me, Q-Up has it’s hooks in me already, which means escape options are limited. Perhaps this writeup will be one of them.
There’s a lot of different layers to Q-Up, and I don’t think I’m even going to identify all of them, let alone write about them. The game is framed as a competitive e-Sport, with all the trappings of such, including ranks, stats, an in-game shop, skins, and a fake TOS that has to be agreed to on launching the game.
The E-Sport in question of course, is just a coin flip. But what a coin flip it is! Complete with matchmaking, exciting animations, and being put on either the Q or Up side. (Fun note: while playing with a friend, he audibly groaned when we got into a game, and were Up side, as he “prefers being Q side”. In a game that’s a literal coin flip.)
Of course, the faux esport/live service game feels like it’s just the tip of the iceberg in a sense. There’s also an in-game mail client where as you play, you end up somewhat accidentally agreeing to “work” for the fictional company making the game in question. I don’t think I can spoil too much from the demo, but even what I saw there seemed to get really weird quite fast, with a weird sci-fi narrative around corporate sabotage.
Oh, and I haven’t even talked about the gameplay! Because yes, there is gameplay. It’s not just a coin-flipper. Instead, fairly early on, you unlock a node based skill grid, different for each of the available characters. This grid is a set of triggers and chaining activation, and by moving nodes around, you can build sets of synergies to make it so that even when you lose, you still win!
Look, it makes more sense if you play the demo, maybe just do that.
Oh, and there are items! To be honest, they’re probably the most standard part of the game, being constructed in such a way that you can build item sets and collections in order to grant yourself additional bonuses. What’s less standard is the incredible weird item shop upgrades, which at one point gave me gems instead of costing them?
Q-Up, like Unfair Flips, is a game about coin flips. But unlike Unfair Flips, it’s not really about flipping coins. Instead, it seems to be a weird satire on live service games at every level, from the design, the development, and the weird nature of E-Sports.
And it absolutely nails the tone. Probably my favorite part so far was this message, with that absolutely perfect “Exec typing things into ChatGPT to summarize them” energy.
It’s just an incredibly fun and weird experience. I only stopped because I hit the level cap on the available characters.
In short: the Q-Up Demo is great, I hope the full game is just as weird, and has even more twists. I’m going to go see if I can get a code to cover it before it comes out, but I highly doubt that will work, in which case I’ll just have to buy it when it does release.